Toptal Engineering Blog

PHP makes it relatively easy to build a web-based system, which is much of the reason for its popularity. But its ease of use notwithstanding, PHP has evolved into quite a sophisticated language, with many nuances and subtleties that can bite developers, leading to hours of hair-pulling debugging. This article highlights ten of the more common mistakes that PHP developers need to beware of.

Ember Data is a library for robustly managing model data in Ember.js applications. Ember Data offers a more flexible and streamlined development workflow, minimizing code churn in response to high-impact changes that would otherwise be disruptive. This comprehensive guide introduces the key constructs and paradigms of Ember Data, demonstrating the value it can bring to you as a developer.

Which Ruby implementation is right for your project? While the reference implementation (Ruby MRI) remains the interpreter of choice, an alternate Ruby implementation may be right for your project, depending on your operational goals and constraints.

This article showcases the Ruby interpreter implementations and runtimes available today, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Web services and their APIs abound. Unfortunately, the vast majority are difficult to use. Reasons range from poor design, to lack of documentation, to volatility, to unresolved bugs, or in some cases, all of the above.

Follow the guidance in this post to help ensure that your web API is clean, well-documented, and easy-to-use. Such APIs are truly rare and are therefore much more likely to be widely adopted and used.

Rails is both easy to use—and also to misuse. Let’s look at 10 common Rails programming mistakes, explore their consequences, and discover ways to steer clear, as we write clean Ruby on Rails code.

Don’t wait for a data breach to happen before making security a priority. This article explains how to set up a proactive web app defense and avoid the top 10 most common security pitfalls.

In this follow-up to his first highly popular AngularJS tutorial, Toptal engineer Raoni Boaventura guides you through the steps of setting up your project, including scaffolding, dependency management, and preparing it for testing.

A year after Google’s launch of Polymer, Toptal engineer Alejandro Hernandez takes it out for a test drive to see if it’s yet ready for prime time. This post explores the maturity and stability of Polymer.js as a foundation for large-scale application development. The results and conclusions from this analysis are provided, along with an introductory overview of the technology.

Python’s simple, easy-to-learn syntax can mislead Python developers – especially those who are newer to the language – into missing some of its subtleties and underestimating the power of the language.

In this article, Toptal’s Martin Chikilian presents a “top 10” list of somewhat subtle, harder-to-catch mistakes that can trip up even the most advanced Python developer.

JavaScript is much more nuanced than most developers initially realize. Even for those with more experience, some of JavaScript’s most salient features continue to be misunderstood and lead to confusion. One such feature, described in this article, is the way that property and variable lookups are performed and the resulting performance ramifications to be aware of.

C# is a powerful and flexible language with many mechanisms and paradigms that can greatly improve productivity. Having a limited understanding or appreciation of its capabilities, though, can leave one in the proverbial state of “knowing enough to be dangerous”. This article describes 10 of the most common programming mistakes made, or pitfalls to be avoided, by C# programmers.

Once you step beyond the comfortable confines of English-only character sets, you quickly find yourself entangled in the wonderfully wacky world of UTF-8.

Indeed, navigating through UTF-8 related issues can be a frustrating and hair-pulling experience. This post provides a concise cookbook for addressing these issues when working with PHP and MySQL in particular, based on practical experience and lessons learned.

This post explores some of the more common types of GPS tracking errors to expect with low-end GPS devices, providing an understanding of what causes them as well as some approaches for correcting them. The techniques outlined can provide users of low-end GPS devices with a reasonable level of automated improvement of the accuracy of their GPS tracks.

I often hear iOS developers ask some variant of the same key question: “What’s the best way to develop a UI in iOS: through Storyboards, NIBs, or code?”

Answers to this question, explicitly or implicitly, tend to assume that there’s a mutually exclusive choice to be made, one that is often addressed upfront, before development.

I’m of the opinion that there’s no single choice to be made. Rather, each option has its strengths and weaknesses—and there’s no need to use any one of them in isolation.

Go is a relatively new language with a number of attractive features. It’s great for writing concurrent programs, thanks to an excellent set of low-level features for handling concurrency. In many cases, though, a handful of reusable abstractions over those low-level mechanisms makes life much easier. This introductory tutorial walks you through building one such abstraction: a wrapper that can turn any data structure into a transactional service in Go.

The recent resurgence in Artificial Intelligence has been powered in no small part by a new trend in machine learning, known as “Deep Learning”. In this article, I’ll introduce you to the key concepts and algorithms behind Deep Learning, beginning with the simplest building block.